Autumn really is the best season. The autumnal equinox took place a couple of weeks ago, marking the end of summer and the start of fall across the Northern Hemisphere. Now it is the season of harvests, festivals, migrations, winter preparations, and, of course, spectacular foliage. Across the North, people are beginning to feel a crisp chill in the evening air, leaves are splashing mountainsides with bright color, apples and pumpkins are being gathered, and animals are on the move. Collected here are some early images from this year, maybe more to follow in the weeks to come.
10 October 2018
The New York Review of Books: The Autocracy App
In Myanmar, hatred whipped up on Facebook Messenger has driven ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. In India, false child abduction rumors on Facebook’s WhatsApp service have incited mobs to lynch innocent victims. In the Philippines, Turkey, and other receding democracies, gangs of “patriotic trolls” use Facebook to spread disinformation and terrorize opponents. And in the United States, the platform’s advertising tools remain conduits for subterranean propaganda.[...]
It’s not just external critics who see something fundamentally amiss at the company. People central to Facebook’s history have lately been expressing remorse over their contributions and warning others to keep their children away from it. Sean Parker, the company’s first president, acknowledged last year that Facebook was designed to cultivate addiction. He explained that the “like” button and other features had been created in response to the question, “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” Chamath Palihapitiya, a crucial figure in driving Facebook’s growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” over his involvement in developing “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” Roger McNamee, an early investor and mentor to Zuckerberg, has become a full-time crusader for restraining a platform that he calls “tailor-made for abuse by bad actors.”[...]
As Facebook proved a better tool for autocrats than for revolutionaries, the protest machine became a surveillance and disinformation machine. In Cambodia, Hun Sen’s government has poured money into Facebook advertising to build up an inflated following, while an “experiment” the company performed in six small countries—moving news content out of the primary Newsfeed into a separate “Explore” section—made independent media sources all but invisible. In the Philippines, where the average user spends nearly four hours a day on social media, Rodrigo Duterte’s government has carried out a campaign of legal harassment against the brave news start-up Rappler—which is, of course, mainly distributed via Facebook.[...]
But the Microsoft precedent is not encouraging. After a federal judge found that Microsoft had abused its monopoly and ruled that it should be separated into two companies, the US Court of Appeals overturned the ruling on multiple grounds. The government has brought no comparably ambitious antitrust action against a major technology company in the two decades since. If the Justice Department were to become interested in breaking up Facebook, it would need the FTC to expand its definition of “consumer harm” to explicitly include violations of data privacy.
UnHerd: May should set her sights on the crony capitalists
Having just endured the party conference season, though, it’s clear to me that, beyond the headlines, an even more profound debate is gaining momentum, with much greater potential impact on the long-term living standards of millions of workers across the UK and beyond. It’s of relevance to the vast majority of countries on earth, in fact, for it’s a debate about the future of capitalism itself.[...]
A recent YouGov poll suggested around 60% of voters think the railways and Royal Mail should be renationalised. Over half want the water and energy companies back in public sector ownership. A ComRes survey earlier this year showed that young British adults now think capitalism is more dangerous than communism.[...]
The reality for many is that, across the West, stagnant wages and spiralling corporate profits are fuelling a sense that capitalism is now skewed, with the benefits accruing to an elite few at the expense of the many. And that’s allowing Corbyn to present, with some success, his programme of aggressive renationalisation, sweeping trade union powers and highly punitive taxation as “the new common sense of our time”. [...]
But many of the voters the Tories need to attract – young couples struggling to make ends meet, graduate professionals with no chance of buying a house – weren’t alive in 1976. To them, assertions from wealthy ministers that ‘capitalism is the key to prosperity’ sound offensive. Talk that ‘Labour always wrecks the economy’ or that Corbyn ‘placated the IRA’ fall on deaf ears.
RSA Replay: How to Build a More Equal and United Society | Eric Klinenberg
Eric Klinenberg is Director of the Institute of Public Knowledge at New York University. His pioneering research into the power of social infrastructure led to his appointment in 2013 as Research Director for President Obama's $1 billion programme to rebuild the region affected by Superstorm Sandy. At the RSA, through uplifting human stories and an illuminating tour through the science of social connection, he shows that properly designing and maintaining our ‘social infrastructure’ might be our single best strategy for a more equal and united society.
Social Europe: The Collapse Of European Social Democracy, Part 2
Instead, Social Democrats, perhaps reluctantly, embraced conservative parties’ populist appeals for low taxes on incomes, inheritances and, particularly, on corporates profits. Thomas Piketty has shown how far taxes on top incomes and wealth have been reduced over decades from rates over 90 percent on incomes in the USA, Germany, Britain and France in the 1950s to less than half of that today. There was also a pronounced shift to more regressive taxes on consumption. This impacted the poor most – traditional SD supporters. Industrial-scale tax avoidance and evasion enabled by hyper-globalisation went unaddressed effectively, angering supporters.[...]
Wages have fallen as profits soared over recent decades, hurting workers. The growing imbalance between capital and labour, shown in the rapid decline in labour’s share of national income (GDP) in many European countries, demonstrates unequivocally how workers have been losing out in the market economy for many decades. This has not gone unnoticed by workers, many of whom struggle to make ends meet, with some having to hold more than one job. It is a reason for rising inequality in the market. The skew in the balance between labour and capital in recent years has been due to these changes. [...]
However, increasingly, fractured politics has allowed this purpose to be diluted into many single issue agendas, impacting on the overarching collective identity of equal protection for all. Thus, identity politics has weakened the collective appeal of broad left parties. Had SD parties paid greater attention to rising inequality and protecting the collective safety net for all, they might have reduced the impact of this fracture in politics.
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